Climate Change: How Do I Cope With Our Planet’s Inevitable Decline?

The Conversation - Neil Levy

No matter what we do, things will get worse. Bernhard Staehli

I recently watched an interview with David Attenborough, in which he was asked whether there is hope that things can get better for our planet. He replied that we can only slow down the rate at which things get worse. It seems to me that this is the first time in history we have known things will get worse for the foreseeable future. How do you live in the shadow of such rapid and inevitable decline? And how can you cope with the guilt? Paul, 42, London.

Neil Levy Neil Levy is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Senior Research Fellow, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, at the University of Oxford. He is the author of six books and over one hundred papers on free will, moral philosophy and philosophy of psychology and mind.

I agree that we live in a unique moment in history. This isn’t like a war or an economic recession, where you know things will be bad for a few years but eventually improve. Never before have we known that the deterioration of not just our countries, but our entire planet, will continue for the foreseeable future – no matter what we do. As Attenborough says, we can (and should) fight to slow the rate at which things get worse, even though we can’t realistically hope for improvement.
We can’t hide from the fact that Attenborough’s opinion reflects mainstream science. Even if we halted carbon emissions tomorrow, a significant degree of future warming is already baked in. Under the most likely scenarios, we’re set for warming of 1.5℃ or much more.
The consequences are dire. If we succeed in limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, we will still have sea level rises of around half a metre, killer heatwaves and drought in many parts of the world – leading to a decrease in agricultural productivity. We can expect mass migrations, death and destruction as a result, with many parts of the world becoming uninhabitable.

English broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough at Great Barrier Reef. wikipedia, CC BY-SA

So how do you cope with this knowledge? The question is all the more difficult when we confront the inevitable guilt: we are all complicit with the sclerotic political system that has failed to address the crisis, and we all contribute to carbon emissions. Few of us can say that we have risen to these challenges.

This article is part of Life’s Big Questions 

The Conversation’s new series, co-published with BBC Future, seeks to answer our readers’ nagging questions about life, love, death and the universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

From doomism to altruism
Weirdly, the knowledge of decline may help some people to cope with the guilt. If things will get worse no matter what we do, then why do anything? This “doomism” may be promoted by fossil fuel interests, to limit real action. Given that what we do today can make a difference to what happens in 2100 or later, though, we shouldn’t give in to this temptation.
Another source of resignation might be that many people who try to fight climate change have rather selfish reasons for caring. Some may only care for their own children, or how the problems will affect their own country. But the climate crisis requires true altruism and real sacrifices. Are we even capable of that?
It is fashionable in some circles to deny that genuine altruism exists. Whether based on the perception that selfless behaviour is selected against by evolution, or merely cynicism, many thinkers have argued that all our actions are motivated by self-interest. Perhaps we give to charity because it makes us feel better about ourselves. Perhaps we recycle for social status.
But your question shows the problem with such arguments. Like you, many of us feel desolate about the inevitable harms the world will face when we are gone – suggesting that we care for future generations for their sake and not just for our own.
I have no personal stake in the world after my death. I don’t have children and I don’t have hopes of leaving a legacy. If I’m lucky, I may live out my life in middle-class comfort, relatively untouched by the upheavals that are guaranteed already to be underway elsewhere. When they hit closer to home, I may already be dead. So why should I care? But I do care, and so do you.
The philosopher Samuel Scheffler has argued that if we were told that humanity would become extinct immediately after our own deaths – but without affecting the quality or duration of our life – we would be devastated and our lives would lose meaning.
For example, imagine living in the world of PD James’ dystopian novel, The Children of Men. Here, mass infertility means the last children have been born and the human race faces extinction as the population gradually ages and diminishes. It’s a thought experiment, considering what society would look like if there were no generations to follow us and no future – and it’s a vision of despair.

Long-term thinking
Contemplating inevitable decline reveals that we care not only that humanity continues to exist long after we are gone, but that we care about whether it flourishes – even in the far future.

We need cathedral thinking to deal with climate change. Gary Campbell-Hall/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Consider those behind the construction of the towering cathedrals of the medieval age. They were often built over more than a generation, so many of those who began work on them never survived to see their project completed. But that didn’t stop them drawing the plans, laying the foundations or labouring over their walls. The cathedrals were for the future, not just the now. Dealing with the climate crisis may require similar long-term thinking.
So while the knowledge of climate destruction may sap motivation and induce anxiety, a long-term perspective could also turn out to be motivating. With a firmer grasp of what’s at stake, it is possible that we will be energised to do what we can to ensure that life a century – or more – from now is better than it might otherwise have been.
Because one thing is given. If you are locked in a state of guilt, shame and depression, you may be incapable of mustering motivation. Sure, the Antarctic ice sheets won’t melt any slower because you recycle. But consider this: if you can inspire just a few people to lead greener lives, they may, in turn, inspire others – and so forth.
People are capable of caring and billions of caring people together can make a difference, as we have seen with the huge climate strikes all over the world. Together, we can force governments and corporations to make the changes needed to slow the rate at which things get worse.
Whether we are going to be able to shed as many selfish desires as necessary to even just slow global warming remains to be seen. Perhaps it takes a unique moment in history just as this to work out how far humans are capable of going for the greater good. The answer may surprise us.

Links

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• 2040: Hope And Action In The Climate Crisis
• Early lessons emerge from bushfires as disaster review season begins
• The outlook for humans is dire without urgent action: 81 laureates' letter to Australia
• 'Dire outlook': Researchers call for urgent Australian climate action
• Quiet Australians Decide It Is Time To Speak Up On Climate Change Action
• Emergency Leaders for Climate Action

What Machiavelli Would Do About Climate Change

Washington Post - Robert Clines

One of history’s most famous thinkers had a solution for natural disasters

Actress and activist Jane Fonda and others protest during a “Fire Drill Fridays” demonstration at the Capitol on Dec. 20, her 82nd birthday, calling on Congress to take action to address climate change. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

Robert Clines  Robert Clines is assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University and author of "A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean."

Major climatic shifts have long been a feature of human society. But the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to man-made rather than cyclical causes of contemporary climate change. And with those changes, we’ve seen nearly annual rises in global temperature averages. Today’s climate change has also caused general climate instability resulting in water supply shortages and devastating droughts; tropical systems dumping feet of water on cities such as Houston; and people freezing to death during cold snaps linked to the polar vortex.

Our experiences with climate-related extreme weather are reminders that even as we invest in long-term solutions looking forward, we should also look to the past for information about how human societies attempted to mitigate the disastrous immediate effects of climate change in their own times.

One place to look is the age of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Borgia and Medici popes and Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” The Italian Renaissance, often seen as the dawn of our own modern age, occurred during one of the greatest periods of climatic instability, known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1300 to 1850. As historian Brian Fagan argues, heightened volcanic and seismic activity, a decrease in solar radiation and shifts in ocean current patterns caused a general global cooling. The Little Ice Age brought with it cooler and wetter summers, longer and colder winters, and violent storms that caused widespread and intense flooding.

Few places were hit by the floods of the Little Ice Age quite like Renaissance Italy. Many of its cultural centers, including Rome and Florence, are on major rivers. Rome’s Tiber River was especially prone to flooding. A January 1310 flood that struck Rome, for example, was an astounding 50 feet above sea level. Monuments such as the Colosseum and the Roman Forum were inundated.

When the father of the Renaissance, Francesco Petrarch, arrived in Rome in 1337, he found a city that had been ravaged by floods directly resulting from the Little Ice Age. Petrarch lamented that the city’s dire state was the result of the papacy’s relocation to Avignon, a small city in southern France. The popes moved there in 1305 after Pope Clement V, a Frenchman, refused to return to Rome because of his allegiance to King Philip IV and because of the lawlessness of Rome’s nobles.

The ensuing political vacuum only exacerbated the Roman response to climate-related disasters. The combination of climate change and poor government response often left the Eternal City without basic civil services. After floods and earthquakes, some structures were left to nature rather than repaired or restored. St. John Lateran, one of the city’s most important ancient churches, was all but destroyed by a fire in 1307, and rebuilding it was anything but efficient. Dilapidated ancient monuments such as the Colosseum were either vandalized for stone or turned into fortified family compounds.

Petrarch couldn’t believe that the papacy had succumbed to French pressures to relocate to Avignon and allowed Rome’s nobles to embrace factionalism. He believed that the popes should reside in Rome to protect or restore its treasures after natural disasters. Papal absenteeism and the nobles’ ignorance caused Petrarch to believe that “nowhere is Rome less known than at Rome itself.”

But it didn’t have to be that way. The popes could have returned home and opted not to be puppets of a foreign regime. The nobles could have set aside their differences. And perhaps something could have been done to ensure that, even if natural disasters could not be prevented or predicted, their impact could be lessened. “Indeed,” Petrarch asked, “who can doubt that Rome will rise up again once she begins to recognize herself?”

Petrarch wasn’t alone. In the 1440s, Flavio Biondo, a historian in Rome writing after the papacy finally did return from France, looked back on the fall of ancient Rome in the 470s and saw parallels to Renaissance Rome’s struggles. As Rome fell in the last decades of the fifth century, foreign invaders and earthquakes had damaged the aqueducts that brought drinking water into the city. But rather than repair the aqueducts, ancient Rome’s elites used their tattered fragments to construct fortified palaces. Just as ancient leaders scrambled to hoard the scraps of empire, Biondo believed that popes in his own time were not doing enough to prevent Rome’s elite from destroying ancient monuments for their own gain.

As successive popes such as Eugenius IV and Nicholas V aimed to restore Rome after their return from France in 1420, monumental building projects multiplied. But Biondo was furious to see his contemporaries quarrying precious marble and travertine from ancient structures that had been damaged by repeated floods and earthquakes to build private palaces rather than build a city that worked for everyday Romans.

Machiavelli, perhaps the most famous voice of the Italian Renaissance, agreed. In his “Prince,” written in 1513 while he was in exile for his opposition to the powerful Medici family, Machiavelli argued that human affairs came down to a 50-50 struggle between fortune and human ingenuity. Machiavelli likened fortune to torrential rivers that overflow their banks, destroy fields and ravage cities. But societies can “take precautions,” Machiavelli explained, “constructing dykes or embankments.” Had his contemporaries confronted dangers, natural or man-made, “this flood would not have caused the great changes it has, or it would not have swept in at all.” Machiavelli wasn’t just speaking metaphorically about the deviousness of popes and princes. He knew there was always a great risk that Florence’s Arno River, like the Tiber, would flood, both during the Little Ice Age and after.

For Italians writing during the Little Ice Age, floods were not abstractions. They and other natural disasters were real-life threats that required immediate intervention to mitigate their destructive forces. Petrarch, Biondo and Machiavelli all understood that disaster can strike when it’s least expected. Earthquakes, fires and floods cannot always be predicted. Such is the whim of fortune.

But Renaissance thinkers knew that the struggle between nature and society calls for immediate intervention as well as long-term solutions focused on the common good. If they were alive today, they would tell us that we must continue to demand that our leaders address climate-related natural disasters rather than ignore them or use them as pretenses for self-aggrandizement. Rebuilding after disasters must include work to prevent future ones through the construction of sustainable infrastructure and the provision of immediate relief and long-term support for disaster victims. They would tell us that disasters shouldn’t be opportunities for speculation and exploitation of built environments.

The great writers of the Italian Renaissance knew that nature was a force to be reckoned with. But they also saw political leaders fail to act when disaster struck. Leaders did little to help the weakest and most vulnerable. To make matters worse, Renaissance princes and nobles opted to exploit disasters for their own gain. While Petrarch, Biondo and Machiavelli didn’t know what caused climate change — they attributed it to fortune or God — they had the foresight to see that human institutions needed to find real solutions. And if we don’t raise our voices as the Renaissance humanists did, who will confront inevitable natural disasters and the greed that accompanies them?

Links

• New report shows just 100 companies are source of over 70% of emissions
• Big oil is the new big tobacco. Congress must use its power to investigate
• What Exxon knew about the Earth's melting Arctic
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from TobaccoSmoke to Climate Change
• Organized Climate Change Denial
• The Lancet Commission on pollution and health
• Fossil Fuels
• Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene
• Time to speak the unspeakable
• The Dark Age of Science Denial
• The methane gun
• Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide
• There is no link': the climate doubters within Scott Morrison's government

Proposed Third Runway At London's Heathrow Airport Deemed Illegal Over Climate Change

SBS - AFP | SBS

Britain's Court of Appeal has ruled a proposed third runway at Heathrow Airport to be illegal because  ministers failed to take into account the government’s commitments to tackle climate change.

Environmental campaigners celebrate outside the High Court in London, Britain, 27 February 2020 Source: EPA

Britain's Court of Appeal on Thursday ruled in favour of environmental campaigners who oppose the building of a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest.
The court said the UK government - which approved the Heathrow extension in 2018 after years of delays - had failed to take into account commitments to the Paris Agreement on limiting global warming.
In reaction, triumphant campaigners called on Prime Minister Boris Johnson - who in 2015 pledged to lie in front of bulldozers to stop Heathrow's third runway for both environmental and aesthetic reasons - to finally cancel the project.
The legal action against the approval was brought by various London councils, environmental groups including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
They lost at an original hearing in May.

File photo of a Heathrow Airport sign. AP

'No account of Paris'
Presenting a summary of the appeal ruling, judge Keith Lindblom said that two years ago, the government of prime minister Theresa May had given no explanation of how it took into account the 2015 Paris accord - which seeks to cap global warming to less than two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels - on building the new runway.
"The Paris Agreement ought to have been taken into account... and an explanation given as to how it was taken into account, but it was not," Lord Justice Lindblom said.
The current Conservative government has decided not to appeal the ruling at London's Supreme Court.
However, Mr Johnson, who has in recent times appeared ambiguous over his once-staunch opposition to the project, may still have to make an official decision on scrapping it.
Notably, Heathrow airport - which is owned by a consortium led by Spanish construction giant Ferrovial - said it would appeal Thursday's ruling.
Heathrow, west of London, wants to increase its total capacity to 130 million passengers per day, compared with about 78 million currently.
"Expanding Heathrow, Britain’s biggest port and only hub, is essential to achieving the prime minister's vision of Global Britain," the airport said Thursday.
Mr Johnson, who wants big infrastructure projects to help drive Britain's post-Brexit economy, earlier this month gave his backing to HS2 high-speed railway line that will link London with major cities in central and northern England - even though construction will ravage ancient woodlands and wildlife.
While HS2 is projected to have a total bill greater than £100 billion - almost all of it at UK taxpayers' expense - the Heathrow runway expansion was forecast to cost around £30 billion, funded almost entirely by the private sector.
Following Thursday's ruling, Mr Khan called on Johnson's government "to abandon plans for Runway Three".
"I'm delighted by the decision handed out by the court of appeal," the London mayor told reporters outside the court.
"I've always said that we've got serious consequences about the government's plan to have a new runway at Heathrow because of the impact in the climate emergency, on the air quality, on noise pollution (and) on the quality of life of Londoners."

Airplanes on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport. AP

'Powerful message'
John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, called on Johnson to formally axe the plans.
"Really good news - it's a fantastic victory - we've been waiting for this day for many, many years," Mr Sauven said outside the court.
"As part of the global campaign against climate change, this is really important ... Cancelling the third runway would send a really powerful message out to the rest of the world."
He added: "Boris Johnson should now put Heathrow out of its misery and cancel the third runway once and for all. No ifs, no buts, no lies, no U-turns."
Friends of the Earth climate campaigner Jenny Bates said that "it was basically a win on climate grounds."
"They knew they had to take climate into account and they didn't take the Paris accord into account," she said.
Building of the third runway had been expected to start in 2022 and take four years.

Links

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• The recent history of Australia's climate change wars
• Every child in the world is under 'immediate threat' from climate and poor diet, landmark study shows